Bloomberg has put together a well reported and extensive look at what appears to have been a 5-year long game of cat and mouse-hack and evade with servers containing some of the U.S. military’s most sensitive and highly-coveted technology.
If F-22′s and F-35′s start dropping out of the sky during the Asian apocalypse in the Taiwan Strait, now you know why.
Beginning at least as early as 2007, Chinese computer spies raided the databanks of almost every major U.S. defense contractor and made off with some of the country’s most closely guarded technological secrets, according to two former Pentagon officials who asked not to be named because damage assessments of the incidents remain classified.
Truly infuriating is that some managers at key defense contractors, operating under lax government supervision, basically decided to simply accept the presence of Chinese hackers in their systems.
My feeling is that if an attacker has been in your environment for years, your data is gone,” Wallisch wrote in an e-mail to a colleague in December 2010, a few weeks before HBGary itself was hacked and the record stops.
“Everything about your business is known, cataloged, analyzed, by your enemy,” Wallisch wrote. “I don’t feel a sense of urgency anymore.
How you feeling now that your name is being plastered in the press, asshat?
One imagines that battlefield software is being rewritten and better safeguards put in place, but how about a little more attention to security this time, fellas?
Photo from The Economist
